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Yet while the people won’t voice righteous anger at the state’s control of our highways and byways, the schooling system has left them unable to rhetorically defend the state beyond elementary slogans. They say things such as “I like roads,” and “We need roads,” and “You want to live in a world without roads?”

The irony, of course, is most citizens don’t even like the roads we have. They simply cannot imagine a world in which roads exist without the state’s monopolistic powers.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-roads-are-getting-worse-and-we-know-who-to-blame/

by John Weeks

Approximately eighty million Americans were expected to hop in their motor vehicles and hit our nation’s roads for Thanksgiving last week. Despite the immediate “lived experience” of abysmal transportation infrastructure, most people will not level criticism at the state as such. You can thank the government-supremacist, anti-capitalist, state-run compulsory schooling system. Murray Rothbard said:

“…since the State began to control education, its evident tendency has been more and more to act in such a manner as to promote repression and hindrance of education, rather than the true development of the individual. Its tendency has been for compulsion, for enforced equality at the lowest level, for the watering down of the subject and even the abandonment of all formal teaching, for the inculcation of obedience to the State and to the ‘group,’ rather than the development of self-independence, for the deprecation of intellectual subjects.” [Emphasis Added]

Yet while the people won’t voice righteous anger at the state’s control of our highways and byways, the schooling system has left them unable to rhetorically defend the state beyond elementary slogans. They say things such as “I like roads,” and “We need roads,” and “You want to live in a world without roads?”

The irony, of course, is most citizens don’t even like the roads we have. They simply cannot imagine a world in which roads exist without the state’s monopolistic powers. In truth, people can build (and have actually built) roads through the free market. Mises Institute Research Fellow Chris Calton observed:

“…in the early years of the new republic, Americans underwent what some historians have described as a ‘turnpike craze.’ The term ‘turnpike’ specifically refers to roadways constructed and operated privately. Early Americans, wanting to connect their communities to the developing market economy, eagerly subscribed to turnpike corporations for local roads. In fact, turnpike corporations were among the first for-profit corporations in the country, and dramatically widened the population of shareholders at a time when corporate stock was rarely available to the public.”

Most Americans don’t realize this. So, they are left to complain about their roads. A lot. And the complaints are not just about deteriorating roads, heavy traffic, and the occasional collapsing bridge. No, many Americans are convinced the roads are inherently destroying society.

See the rest here

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